One Coconut Tree at Sunset

I normally take photos of this coconut tree at sunrise. I must have taken hundreds of photos of it over the years…against spectacular red skies or pink clouds…or lit by sunlight as the sun comes over the mountains…or in silhouette…sheltering doves or baldpates or on one occasion a very steely-eyed johncrow. But today I photographed the coconut tree, not as the sun was rising, but as it was setting…

This meant that I was standing on my roof with my back to the setting sun……seeing coconuts at various stages of development……some very small ones, just starting out….And all the while, behind me, the sun continued to set…

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Perfectly Prickly Patterns on #WorldPhotographyDay

If you want to learn more about the Fibonacci sequence in nature, this isn’t the place to do it. It is a fascinating topic and there are many sites on the internet with all you could hope to learn. There are even some sites dealing specifically with the Fibonacci sequence in cacti. In this post, however, I am simply going to share some cacti photos…perfectly prickly patterns.

One Sunday morning during a recent trip to London, I visited the arrid room of the Barbican Conservatory with my daughter Kimi. I spent a happy hour or so looking at details of these plants through a camera lens.

Cacti are definitely strange-looking plants that could have been designed by sci-fi writers to inhabit dystopian landscapes. Certainly the natural environments in which many of them originally evolved and thrive are often stark and harsh. And their characteristic spines present a formidable defense mechanism, as anyone unfortunate enough to have had an upfront and personal encounter with a cactus can attest.

 

They are also remarkably beautiful plants, often as a result of their prickly patterns… viewed from a distance…

…or a bit closer…

There are wide varieties of cacti, with some not fitting the typical image at all…”windswept” spines, for example…

…or something rather like a sponge or a brain…

Their flowers can be beautiful also, in a traditional way…

…or they can be distinctly odd…

But always such intriguing patterns. I must spend some time photographing the cacti in my own garden at home soon.

After the arrid room and its cacti, Kimi and I went on to brunch, which was beautiful in another manner entirely!

 

A Venerable Mango Tree: On A Sunday

The morning after Gilbert had raked its eye across Jamaica’s spine, blasting through decades of complacency and careless wishes to experience a real hurricane, I went to see how a nearby neighbour was doing. Part of his roof was sitting in our front yard and when I got to his house, I could see that all of the roof had been blown off during the storm. He was all right, he said. He and his sister, both of them quite elderly, had retreated to the only part of the house with a concrete slab roof and his family had called and were on their way to help.

But, he told me, I could expect the next mango season to be a bountiful one. The hurricane would have pruned branches, shaken up the roots and new life would be coursing through the trees that had survived.

And he was right. The massive old Bombay mango tree in our back yard has never borne fruit as abundantly as it did in the post- Gilbert season. Not in the thirty years since Sept 1988. 

It was an old and venerable tree even then. Older and even more venerable now. It has had encounters with subsequent storms that have brushed past since. This year hasn’t been a very good season for the old Bombay tree, in fact. Relatively few in number, with a high incidence of worms in the ripe fruit.

The height of the hurricane season is still to come.

I don’t believe that there have to be storms for there to be good crops, not literally or figuratively. But my Bombay mango tree may be aligned with my old (long deceased) neighbour’s words.

The Sky One Evening

Yesterday evening I went up on the roof to watch the sun go down, something I often do. By the time I got there, the sun had already set, but the sky remembered!

Every sunset is different. Even the same sunset sky goes through many moods, vibrant shades of orange giving way to subtle shades of pink.

Eventually all sign of the sun is gone, leaving the night to electric lights and Venus…

 

 

How Closely Have You Looked At A Rusting Roof?

A zinc roof rusting…

…changes, depending on how near……or how far……you are……from it….

 

Curiosity & Wonder: Weekly Photo Challenge – Final Edition – All-Time Favourites

“Welcome to the final installment of the Weekly Photo Challenge. In wishing you a fond farewell, we wanted to share our all-time favorite photos with you. We welcome you to share your favorites with us. Happy photographic trails!”

One of my favourite photos is of my granddaughter at the beach. She has such a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world around her, a sense which is sometimes a bit dulled in us as adults. Photography is one of the things that helps me to keep that sense sharpened!

I have really enjoyed the Weekly Photo Challenge prompts, the first of which I responded to in October 2016. I don’t think I missed one since. It has really been a fun way to look back at photos I’ve taken and to share them on my blog. And it’s been wonderful to see the incredible photos shared by others! Good luck going forward, everyone! 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge – All-Time Favorites

Love Bush: Weekly Photo Challenge – Twisted

“This week, show us something that doesn’t maintain a straight line.”

Love bush or dodder (Cuscuta spp) is a parasitic vine that is often seen growing on hedges and other plants on the roadside in Jamaica.

It is called love bush because folklore has it that if you want to know if someone is your true love or returns your love, you can break off a piece of the vine and say the person’s name as you throw the vine on another plant. If the vine catches and starts to grow, then you know the person you named does indeed love you. Unfortunately, this childhood game helps to spread the parasite to new plants.The vine twists around itself, other plants and fences as it spreads from place to place…Twisted indeed…

Weekly Photo Challenge – Twisted